Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first
wiki.
A pioneer in both design patterns and extreme programming, he started programming the software
WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham
& Cunningham, on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository.
He currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon, and is the Co-Creation Czar for CitizenGlobal.
He is Nike's first Code for a Better World Fellow.
He has authored a book about wikis, titled The Wiki Way, and also invented Framework
for Integrated Tests.
He was a keynote speaker at the first three instances of the WikiSym conference series
on wiki research and practice.
Personal history Cunningham received his Bachelor's degree
in interdisciplinary engineering and his master's degree in computer science from Purdue University.
He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.
He has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the
Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.
He is founder of the The Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern
Languages of Programming conference which it sponsors.
Cunningham was part of the Smalltalk community.
From December 2003 until October 2005, he worked for Microsoft Corporation in the "patterns
& practices" group.
From October 2005 to May 2007, he held the position of Director of Committer Community
Development at the Eclipse Foundation.
In May 2009, Cunningham joined AboutUs as its chief technology officer.
On March 24, 2011 The Oregonian reported that Cunningham had quietly departed AboutUs to
join Venice-based CitizenGlobal, a startup working on crowd-sourced video content, as
their Chief Technology Officer.
He remains "an adviser" with AboutUs.
Ideas and inventions
Cunningham is well known for a few widely disseminated ideas which he originated and
developed.
The most famous among these are the wiki and many ideas in the field of software design
patterns.
He owns the company Cunningham & Cunningham Inc., a consultancy that has specialized in
object-oriented programming.
When asked in a 2006 interview with internetnews.com whether he considered patenting the wiki concept,
he explained that he thought the idea "just sounded like something that no one would want
to pay money for."
Cunningham is interested in tracking the number and location of wiki page edits as a sociological
experiment and may even consider the degradation of a wiki page as part of its process to stability.
"There are those who give and those who take.
You can tell by reading what they write."
According to Steven McGeady, Cunningham advised him in the early 1980s, "The best way to get
the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."
McGeady dubbed this Cunningham's law.
Although Cunningham was referring to interactions on Usenet, the law has been used to describe
how Wikipedia works.
Patterns and extreme programming Cunningham has contributed to the practice
of object-oriented programming, in particular the use of pattern languages and the class-responsibility-collaboration
cards.
He also contributes to the extreme programming software development methodology.
Much of this work was done collaboratively on the first wiki site.
See also PatternShare
Framework for integrated test References
External links WikiWikiWeb, including his WikiHomePage
2012 Dr. Dobb's Interview EclipseCon 2006 interview with Ward Cunningham
Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.
The Microsoft patterns & practices group home page
A Laboratory For Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking
The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work "The Web's wizard of working together" – profile
originally in The Oregonian, December 19, 2005
Ward's Personal Pages https:github.com/WardCunningham – Ward Cunningham
on GitHub Wards Twitter Handle Ward Cunnigham on Twitter